


All Fall Down

by Cheloya



Category: Havemercy Series - Jaida Jones & Danielle Bennett
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-19
Updated: 2017-05-19
Packaged: 2018-10-27 06:44:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10803900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cheloya/pseuds/Cheloya
Summary: Old, imported. Balfour's early days are rough.





	All Fall Down

Adamo frowns when he enters the common room. Looks around. “Where’s the rookie?” There’s a snicker he doesn’t like, and Rook’s eyes gleam in answer from the other side of the room, but the snickerer doesn’t speak.  
  
Jeannot is more helpful, and sourer. “In his rooms.”  
  
“Probably embroidering,” Rook adds with great satisfaction, and that’s when Adamo knows something is wrong.  
  
*  
  
Balfour is not embroidering. Balfour is still red about the eyes and white about the lips, and Adamo can tell his hands are shaking because it shouldn’t take him so many tries to put needle and thread through a buttonhole.  
  
Adamo closes the door behind him, because unlike the rest of these idiots, he knows enough about manners and decorum to have a use for them in certain situations.  
  
So he closes the door, but he leans against Balfour’s bedpost and eyes him carefully, not giving him the luxury of an avoidant gaze.  
  
The kid holds up well under pressure, on the ground and in the air, and this is no exception; Balfour’s shoulders hunch defensively, and his normally soft voice is sharp as a whip or a wingtip to the side of the head. Still cracks in the middle of the sentence, though, no matter how furious he is: “I suppose I was asking for that as well?”  
  
“Were you?” Adamo returns evenly, and Balfour grits his teeth so hard, he hears the kid’s jaw crack.  
  
“I suppose I must have been,” he grits out slowly, in a decent imitation of his well-bred murmur. “Silly me, having a shred of common decency. I’d rather ‘ask for it’ on my _knees_ than integrate seamlessly with that lot of—” He bites down on his tongue, hurls the pants across the room, and it’s only then that Adamo realises his legs are bare, that there are bruises on his pale, muscular thighs.  
  
He’s taken the step forward before he’s properly thought about it, and the way Balfour twitches to face him, flinches away on instinct, is a mark of just how far this has gone.  
  
“Sit down,” says Adamo, and when Balfour looks ready to argue, colour surging in his pale aristocratic face, he says it louder: “ _Sit._ ”  
  
He doesn’t miss the way Balfour’s shoulders tighten, blood draining from his face, as he sits down on the edge of his mattress and glares up at Adamo, waiting to be betrayed.  
  
Adamo doesn’t look him in the eye when he crouches between Balfour’s thighs; there are rules, and some of them he doesn’t mind keeping. He keeps his fingers gentle as he pushes at Balfour’s knee to get the bruises in better light.  
  
“What was it about?”  
  
Balfour’s gentle voice is sour, but worse than that, it’s hurt. “Rook’s never-ending quest to prove that anything gentler than a knife fight belongs to a woman.”  
  
Adamo does meet his eyes, then, and it’s sympathy as well as appraisal. “You’re going to have to put up with it.”  
  
“I know that,” Balfour snaps, fingers tensing in the sheets. “I can’t beat him. I just. It makes me so _angry. He_ makes me so angry. I couldn’t even spit, let alone get a hit in.”  
  
“Break your fingers,” Adamo muttered, conceding on Balfour’s behalf that sometimes these things were for the best. And then his voice turned the same steel as his dragon. “Anything else I should know about before I introduce him to the coffee table?”  
  
Balfour stares at him. There’s no relief in his face, only another sick kind of resignation, that the only way he can win his battles here is through Adamo. Finally he says, very quiet, “Bruises on my hips, and he wrenched my shoulder a bit. Nothing—” He swallows. “Nothing important.”  
  
Adamo lifts the edge of Balfour’s shirt, brushes his thumb along a darkening smear without really thinking about it, and politely doesn’t mention the hitch in Balfour’s breathing. “Dislocated?”  
  
“No.”  
  
It’s a clear end to the conversation, so Adamo goes, but not without noticing a different kind of shiver working its way along Balfour’s jaw.

**Author's Note:**

> (And then Tina started sending me images of Bagoas and I got horribly distracted so just pretend that Adamo has gone to totally pin Rook like Rook totally pinned Balfour to get his pants off, only without the pants removal, and that he found some clever and understated way to explain to Rook in a gruff and unmisinterprable sentence that Rook is to Balfour what Adamo is to Rook, only a septad times worse because Balfour is pronounced ‘moe~’, and that if he doesn’t want his nose broken again, he’ll go back to blue paint and keep his fucking hands off Balfour’s trousers.
> 
> Also I realised I had to be up and out of the house in seven hours.)


End file.
